“Maybe that’s what we should do,” I suggested. “Let Sköll be king, and you and I will live at Bebbanburg and keep a fleet. Think of all the new monasteries in Wessex! Great buildings stuffed with silver! We’ll be richer than kings!”

He laughed. He knew I was not serious. “I paid a skald to look into the future,” he said suddenly and softly.

I felt a shiver. “What did he say?”

“It was a woman.”

I touched Thor’s hammer. “And she said?”

“She gave me back my silver.” He still spoke softly and I felt the shiver again. “She said the future was a mist and she could not see through it, but I think she did see and dared not tell me.” He turned to me. “Finan said you met Sköll’s sorcerer?”

“We did, but he spoke nonsense,” I said dismissively. “He just said what Sköll wanted him to say.”

“He talked of kings dying?”

Finan, I thought, should have kept silent. “He talked nonsense,” I said forcibly, “he babbled about eagles and a king without a crown.” I had to steel myself not to touch the hammer as I spoke. Snorri had said three kings would go to the high place, and two would die. Sköll was one of the kings, Sigtryggr the second, and I was the third, the king without a crown. And two of us must die. Yet none of that made sense. Snorri had said that the Dane and the Saxon would betray me, and what had that to do with a war against the Norse? “It was nothing but nonsense,” I insisted.

Sigtryggr came back to the table and sat. “Why did Sköll go to meet you?”

I frowned, wondering if Sigtryggr suspected me of disloyalty. “To persuade me not to fight him, of course.”

“Yes, but why? He knows he killed your daughter. What made him think you might give up a chance of revenge?”

I suddenly understood what he was saying, and the realization struck me with the same force that the curse had made all those weeks before. I stared at Sigtryggr. “Because . . .” I began, then dared not say the words in case even speaking them made them untrue.

“Because,” Sigtryggr spoke the words for me, “his sorcerer foretold that you would kill him.”

“No,” I said, but without conviction.

“Why else try to dissuade you?” he asked, then paused, but I said nothing. I gazed into the tavern’s fire where a log spat. “I can’t think why else he went to you,” Sigtryggr said.

“We can’t know the future,” I said. “But I hope you’re right.”

“Stiorra would have cast the runesticks,” he said wistfully. “She always said she could tell the future from the sticks.”

“And Stiorra,” I said, “is why we must kill Sköll.”

He nodded. “I know.”

As ever, a mention of my daughter tore at my heart. I wanted to talk of something else, anything else. “How’s Queen Eadgyth?” I asked.